Past

The past speaks to us in a thousand voices, warning and comforting, animating and stirring to action. What its great thinkers have thought and written on the deepest problems of life, shall we not hear and enjoy? ~ Felix Adler

I know when I was a kid, I used to look at these pictures and listen to the songs of the Gay Nineties, and I used to say to my mother, 'Oh, I wish I had lived then; it was so gay and so wonderful.' [...] Now [the Jazz Age] seems very mysterious and wonderful to you, kids, and when you have kids, they'll say, 'Gee, Dad, those 50's, they were something.' ~ Helen Kane

The past is a term used to indicate the totality of events which occurred before a given point in time. The past is contrasted with and defined by the present and the future. The concept of the past is derived from the linear fashion in which human observers experience time, and is accessed through memory and recollection.

The past speaks to us in a thousand voices, warning and comforting, animating and stirring to action. What its great thinkers have thought and written on the deepest problems of life, shall we not hear and enjoy? The future calls upon us to prepare its way. Dare we fail to answer its solemn summons?

Is there any good reason why we cannot extend our multi-cultural generosity to include another dimension? That of time. The past, too, is another country. Its ghosts may look strange and frightening and slightly misshapen in body and mind, but all the more reason then, to welcome them to our shores.

Martin Amis, Lecture given at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University (30 January 1997).

All the political, economic, administrative, and scientific issues of our times were unknown to the Prophet's companions. They did not sit on chairs in front of cameras, they had no media, no satellite TV. Does this prove that we are not allowed to use them? The fact that something did not exist in the past does not mean that it is forbidden.

One thing alone not even God can do,
To make undone whatever hath been done.

Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle, trans. Robert Williams (1879), book 6, chapter 2, p. 154. See also R. W. Browne's translation (1850), Book VI, Chapter II:
Therefore Agathon rightly says: "Of this alone even God is deprived, the power of making things that are past never to have been".
Same idea in John Milton, Paradise Lost, 9. 926. Pindar, Olympia. 2. 17. Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis, 2. 5. 10. Aristotle attributed these words to Agathon, an Athenian tragic poet who lived in the latter half of the fifth century B.C. In his column, "Today and Tomorrow", Walter Lippmann attributed the same idea to George Santayana: "He might meditate on Santayana's saying that not even God can change the past". New York Herald Tribune (June 11, 1951), p. 17. Reported as unverified in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989).

Benjamin describes the revolutionary moment when the past suddenly bursts into the present, as if rising from the grave to rectify the wrongs it suffered at the hands of a banally triumphant progress. Thus Benjamin’s historical materialism implies a capacity to link otherwise separate and distant moments in time through a profound empathy. The empathy takes on a revolutionary character by disrupting the regularity of quotidian temporality. Without this sort of tie to the past, no critical stance in the present is possible.

Our yesterdays present irreparable things to us; it is true that we have lost opportunities which will never return, but God can transform this destructive anxiety into a constructive thoughtfulness for the future. Let the past sleep, but let it sleep on the bosom of Christ. Leave the Irreparable Past in His hands, and step out into the Irresistible Future with Him.

It is a mistake to think that the past is dead. Nothing that has ever happened is quite without influence at this moment. The present is merely the past rolled up and concentrated in this second of time. You, too, are your past; often your face is your autobiography; you are what you are because of what you have been; because of your heredity stretching back into forgotten generations; because of every element of environment that has affected you, every man or woman that has met you, every book that you have read, every experience that you have had; all these are accumulated in your memory, your body, your character, your soul. So with a city, a country, and a race; it is its past, and cannot be understood without it.

I know when I was a kid, I used to look at these pictures and listen to the songs of the Gay Nineties, and I used to say to my mother, 'Oh, I wish I had lived then; it was so gay and so wonderful.' [...] Now [the Jazz Age] seems very mysterious and wonderful to you, kids, and when you have kids, they'll say, 'Gee, Dad, those 50's, they were something.' [...] I really think it goes in cycles. When your kids come in and say 'Gee, Dad, I wish we had done that,' and so on and so forth, it's the same thing. I don't think it's changed a great deal.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience.

Listen to the Water-Mill:
Through the live-long day
How the clicking of its wheel
Wears the hours away!
Languidly the Autumn wind
Stirs the forest leaves,
From the field the reapers sing
Binding up their sheaves:
And a proverb haunts my mind
As a spell is cast,
"The mill cannot grind
With the water that is past."

I need not ask thee if that hand, now calmed,
Has any Roman soldier mauled and knuckled,
For thou wert dead, and buried and embalmed,
Ere Romulus and Remus had been suckled:
Antiquity appears to have begun
Long after that primeval race was run.